Mid Life Fitness

We are consciously aware of only a small part of what happens around us, and indeed of the actions and reactions that we take. Your body does see, hear, feel or smell those things, but you are not aware of it. It is estimated that we each make in excess of sixty thousand decisions each and every day, but our conscious minds make only make a tiny fraction of those decisions. The question you should be asking then is how are the other decisions being made?

The reason we don’t make all of those decisions with our conscious minds is that there are too many of them and frankly we have more interesting things to be doing. As the information comes into your mind, the mind makes an initial choice as to whether it can handle it by itself or if it needs to pass it up to your conscious mind. Habitual actions and learned actions don’t need the conscious mind to make decisions about. When you tried say a deadlift for the first time your conscious mind was actively involved. Once you’ve learned the right form for the exercise your body can take over the decision making for that and you can start paying conscious attention to the effort involved in lifting the extra weight you added to the bar for that set.

Stop running on automatic

If the body can handle those things automatically why do we care? The problems lie in the areas of bad habits, changing habits and routines. I’ve mentioned before that routines are ruts. When you are in a routine, the conscious mind is not at all involved and instead the body handles whatever it is that you are doing. The more often you do something the less the conscious mind needs to pay attention, until one day it doesn’t pay any attention, and what’s worse you don’t even realise you aren’t paying attention – and if you don’t realise that then you aren’t able to do anything about it.

At this point you might be saying to yourself “well OK, but so what?” So I’d like to direct your attention back to the opening sentence and to rephrase it. All success derives directly from having a clear purpose. A clear purpose is set by the conscious mind, and directly changes the filter process about what the mind handles on automatic and what is brought to your attention. Ever been in a hurry and found that all the lights were red, or the person in front was infuriatingly slow? This is what happens when you set new priorities and your selection process changes so that things you are now interested in are brought to your attention instead of simply being filed away.

Start learning to win

Once you realise that this is the truth of how you live then you can start to see why some people succeed and others are doomed to failure. Whatever your conscious mind pays attention to that is what you will find your mind attracting. Pessimists are constantly reminded by how bad things are and optimists are reminded about good things are even though both may be considering the same set of facts.

Why do people fail to stick to a program, why do they constantly chase the holy grail of programs? These are not the actions of self confident optimists. Any event can be interpreted in a number of ways. How you interpret it reveals how your emotions are invested and how you perceive reality. If you can realise this then you can detach yourself from the situation and change the filter on how you interpret the situation.

It isn’t enough though to remove the negative belief, you also need to replace it with a positive one. If your goals for what you want to achieve from your workouts are clearly written out you already have the foundation on which to build. Ask yourself then what you intend to give away in order to achieve the goal, because you don’t have the time or resources to do everything, and something has to not happen in order for your goal to happen. Write that down too and repeat aloud to yourself both your goals and what you are giving away several times a day.

Never underestimate the power of positive affirmations. This is how you refocus the hardwiring of what is brought to your attention and what is dealt with on automatic. Just having a goal is not enough. Not even having a plan is enough. It needs to be refreshed in your mind constantly until you have changed your filter enough that your plan becomes the automatic decision.

Take possession of your own mind today.